I always felt sorry for Catweazle who used to shout "electrickery"! when anyone switched on a light. In the sixties my aged grandmother came to live with us. She came from a rural area and had never quite got used to the telephone. When it rang she used to jump. But she discovered that you could stop it ringing by taking the handset off the body and putting it down. It never occurred to her to say anything into it. When my mother came home she would say: "I can hear someone shouting". "Yes Grandma," my mother would say. "That's the operator (who had guessed what had happened) telling you to put the handset back." These days I sympathise with my aged gran, although I have to say that technology is moving faster than it did then.

My grandmother had a related habit. If one of my grandfather's favorite songs came on the radio while he was out of the room, she would turn it off so he could hear it when he returned. Apparently when they first hot electricity she would plug something into every outlet, to stop the electricity from leaking out.

If a stone falls on an egg: alas for the egg
If an egg falls on a stone: alas for the egg